A largely informal geopolitical alliance is again slowly cohering around a series of shared principles — basically that the Western model of development must be left behind for one more inclined to support “national aspirations.”

If Iran could easily turn to other commercial outlets, it already would be using them. Indeed, despite the recent tensions, an Iran-Georgia trade forum went ahead in early July, with business meetings and a product exhibition.

Although the Eurovision contest helped raise Azerbaijan’s profile in Europe, the country remains largely unknown in America. However, its growing role as the anti-Iran is likely to bring more public attention. Positive attention.

Baku has been able to weather this storm in no small part because of its unique makeup — its oil wealth, its careful development of non-petroleum industry, its historically tolerant Shi’i population, and its position at the crossroads of so many cultures and states in Eurasia.

Wars do not all arise from privation, but markets break and are overrun, and democracy never grows, where men and women starve or shiver in the cold. Baku is learning this lesson over time. Hopefully, Europe will as well.

This is an opportunity to end the blather that comes of a process in which Russia backs its Armenian client, France yields to its Armenian diaspora, and the United States arranges the conference chairs during shuttle diplomacy that accomplishes nothing.

Azerbaijan has chosen to be a pro-Western and pro-American sovereignty. Like so many of the countries formerly under the control of the totalitarian Russian state, it has opted to look West rather than to join some Eurasian pact of the sort Vladimir Putin envisions.